LENORE TAWNEY
Part One: 12 October – 6 November 2021
Part Two: 18 November – 8 January 2022
Alison Jacques is delighted to announce two exhibitions of work by pioneering textile artist Lenore Tawney (b. 1907, Lorain, Ohio; d. 2007, New York). Part one, on view during Frieze London, focuses on Tawney’s early work and material
innovations; part two will feature rarely seen late work and an installation from the iconic ‘Cloud’ series. The exhibitions, Tawney’s first in the UK, follow a landmark survey at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin (2019).
In 1957, Tawney lowered her beloved cat Pansy into her Daimler and drove from Chicago to Manhattan. At the age of 50, she was leaving her home of 30 years in the search of ‘a barer life, closer to reality, without all the things that clutter and
fill our lives.’ Tawney may not have earnestly committed herself to her artistic practice until relatively late in life, but this move initiated a total immersion.
‘The truest thing in my life was my work’, she later recalled. ‘I wanted my life to be as true.’
Upon arriving in New York, Tawney settled on Coenties Slip, home to such luminaries as Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, before moving to the nearby South Street, where she leased three floors of a former sailmaker’s
loft. It was here, free to experiment at unprecedented scale, that a nascent idea crystallised, one that would define Tawney’s work for the coming half decade. ‘The idea of weaving in volume floated up to consciousness this morning’, she wrote in 1958. ‘I awoke nervous and excited all day thinking about it.’
Tawney was born in Lorain, Ohio, in 1907, and raised on the shore of Lake Erie. She spent her formative years as a proofreader for a legal publisher in Chicago, but the imprint of Ohio lingered. Her work – weaving, collage, mail art – is strewn with birds, feathers, stones; she never shook ‘the blue of the water and the sky.’ Finding equal value in Zen Buddhism and such Western thinkers as Erich Neumann and Carl Jung, Tawney lived as a modern-day pantheist, finding within nature an all-encompassing and immanent spirit.
